Tuesday, July 24, 2007

If you watch Fox News Sunday from time to time, you have probably seen it: a complete look of bewilderment or incredulity on the faces of Brit Hume or Fred Barnes (or in the picture here--Bill Kristol) as they mentally try to grasp what Juan Williams could possibly be talking about... A case in point:

Sometimes when you see NPR's Juan Williams on Fox News, you are left scratching your head wondering what planet he lives on, and what the color of the sky is there.

Such questions must certainly have been raised in the minds of right-thinking "Fox News Sunday" viewers this morning when Williams suggested that the liberal blog Daily Kos "is now center."

I kid you not.

What precipitated this extraordinary lapse of reason on Williams' part was a rather accurate observation made by the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol concerning Democrat presidential candidates attending the upcoming YearlyKos convention (video available here):

Every Democratic presidential nominee is going to the Daily Kos convention. That's the left-wing blogger who was not respectable three or four years ago. The Howard Dean kind of sponsor. Now the whole party is going to pay court to him and to left wing blogs. Not a single one is going to the Democratic Leadership Council meeting in a couple of weeks. That's the organization that Bill Clinton was head of in the early '90s - that was supposed to be the new, more moderate Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has gone left and it will hurt them in 2008.

Makes sense, right? After all, the DLC was indeed crucial for Clinton's success in the '90s. Yet, the past two Democrat presidential candidates have shied away from this group, and its tenets, moving further to the left, and not winning their respective elections.

With this in mind, it seems quite reasonable to suggest that Democrat presidential candidates who follow Al Gore and John Kerry's leftist playbook rather than the successful, though disingenuous, moderate campaign of Bill Clinton will have a hard time winning in the general election.

Not so surprisingly, Williams saw things differently:

What you described as left is now center. The majority of the American people, 70 percent, want us out of Iraq. In fact, if you asked Iraqis, 60 some percent of Iraqis say we're doing more harm than good in Iraq. There's a center here and I think what you're saying is they're playing somehow to the left.

Even if the only issue on voters' minds was Iraq, Williams' point would be way off base.

When one contemplates that Williams is actually believed by a certain percentage of his audience, it becomes easier to understand how the American people could have been so duped--by Democrats in General--in the first place.